Tag Archives: Memory

Back in March, I mentioned that filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, of Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and Inglourious Basterds fame, was working on a movie about antebellum slavery wrapped in the format of a spaghetti Western. That movie, Django Unchained, hits the movie screens today. The film stars Jamie Foxx in the title role, and the cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, and Samuel L. Jackson.

In 2007, Quentin Tarantino, speaking with The Daily Telegraph, discussed an idea for a form of spaghetti western set in America’s Deep South which he called “a southern,” stating that he wanted “to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to.”

In December 2009, Tarantino revealed that he had another project but wouldn’t reveal any details except that it was less epic in scale and in a different genre entirely from Inglourious Basterds and that he could finish it in a five to six month period of intensive writing. On May 2, 2011, it was confirmed that project was the “Southern” that he had talked about in 2007, with the title Django Unchained, featuring the revenge of a slave on his former master.

I want to give a hat tip to the CWMemory blog for highlighting the following video. It is from YouTube member “D Ennis,” and discusses what Southern Heritage and the Confederate Flag (also called the Confederate Battle Flag, or CBF) mean to him.

I have two thoughts on this video. First, I hope it’s not interpreted as meaning that the author is expressing intolerance for Southern heritage, or is saying, for example, that he’s against people being able to display the Confederate flag, if they so choose. He’s simply saying that, the Confederate flag means one thing to some people and another thing to him; and that his own view of Southern Heritage and the CBF is a legitimately Southern one.

Second, I think it’s important to understand how the video author’s feelings came to be. He associates the CBF with segregation and massive resistance, and there is a reason for that. During the Jim Crow/Civil Rights Movement/Massive Resistance Era, many whites associated their behavior with the CBF, and used the CBF and Confederate iconography as their symbol. Consider the famous 1963 inauguration speech of Alabama governor George Wallace, in which he invoked the Confederacy as follows:

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

Note that Wallace explicitly draws a straight line from the creation of the Confederacy to the continuation of racial segregation.

Images such as the following one (Wallace in front of the CBF) caused segregation and massive resistance to be conflated with the Confederacy, in the minds of a lot of folks.